Because I could not stop for Death he kindly stopped for me. The carriage held but just Ourselves and Immortality. – Emily Dickinson

In December of 1986, I was operated on to remove my pituitary gland and the small benign tumor within it that had resulted in Cushing’s Disease, and had caused a lengthy hospital stay in the beginning of that year. It was during that earlier hospital stay that I had the out-of-body experience I have written about in a previous post (which you can read here).

I remember the anesthesia being administered and being told to count backwards from one hundred. At about 96, I blinked my eyes, and when I opened them again an instant later, I was being wheeled back to my room. I asked the nurse, “When does it start?” She answered, “It’s all over.”

Eight hours had passed in the blink of an eye. It could have been eight years, or eight million. The anesthesia blanked me out of existence so completely, that I wondered if death was like that:

An instant that lasts for eternity!

In the years since those two events, and as I approach my sixty-fifth birthday, death itself holds no fear for me, because just as in the Angel of Death excerpt from Master of the Jinn, I really do consider it a mercy from God. But I cannot but wonder if one of those experiences holds the answer to the great mystery of what comes afterward. Both possessed the immediacy of experiential truth, but can both be real? Is the instant of nothingness a precursor to awaking on a different plane of existence? Can it be that our spirit, or soul, or ka, or whatever your faith calls it, leaves the physical body at death and after an instant of blankness, joins, or rejoins, the Eternal Godhead?

Socrates asked the same question, concluding: “Death is one of two things…Either it is annihilation, and the dead have no consciousness of anything; or, as we are told, it is really a change: a migration of the soul from one place to another.”

My late father-in-law believed the former. Once I asked him if he thought that we live on after death. He said, “Yes, in blood and memory.” In other words, we live on in the bloodline passed to our children and grandchildren and down the generations. And in the memory they carry of us, until that is lost in time, when those that still remember us have also died. He considered himself a realist.

And yet, the first law of thermodynamics, an expression of the principle of the conservation of energy, states that energy can be transformed (changed from one form to another), but cannot be created or destroyed.

Is that also true of the energy of consciousness, which is, after all, the only part of us that really would go on after the body dies? Or is it just our greater Self that goes on, our soul, which is that ineffable part of us that is always in touch with, and originally a part of, the Oneness of Divine Love? Inshallah, it is so. I do not mind at all leaving the lesser self behind; the individual ego with its fears and jealousy and enmity and regrets. Let it die as the electro-chemical brain and body functions come to a stop.

I know that love goes on. And after years on the Sufi path, I have seen what can only be described as a glimpse of… something other.

And, so as not to waste what God has given, I am also an organ donor; I prefer to leave all organs that are still of any use to help others, and the rest to be cremated. I like the efficiency of the fire, taking up as little room at the end as I did at the beginning. And I like the idea of my ashes scattered to the winds of the world.

But does individual consciousness completely die? Or does the soul or greater Self have its own higher level of consciousness? My late Master, Dr. Javad Nurbakhsh, was asked this very question, and he said, “In the end, the drop becomes one with the Ocean, but it does not lose its wetness.”

There is hope in that statement. I have studied many religions and their beliefs of the afterlife, and in all honesty they sound mainly the same, a heavenly paradise where the individual self consciousness, and often the resurrected body, is kept intact and rewarded or punished for its life on earth in just measure to its deeds. But if the individual self stops at the end of life, the afterlife must be something else entirely. What that something else, that wetness is, is one of the eternal questions of living beings. The ultimate mystery!

And that’s what I’m counting on :) All questions are inevitably useless. The answer will come soon enough!

No mythology and metaphor for me. I want the great mystery, all of it, no matter what it is—a billion years in the blink of an eye, or an infinite panorama as vast as the universe; and an endless sea of stars on which to sail.

Death is an angel with two faces; to us he turns a face of terror, blighting all things fair; the other burns with glory of the stars, and love is there.
– T. C. Williams

Once more, dear readers, thank you for your comments on the previous post about my out of body experience. They have enriched the post immeasurably.

And there is no doubt that some of you have experienced something similar. Here is one true story I was told.

I began dating a very gifted and spiritual woman about a year and a half after my hospital stay, who also happened to be a psychologist. No, I wasn’t seeing her professionally lol. But after some months, I did tell her about my illness, the hospital, and my out of body episode. I thought at the time that it was my own fear of death that caused me to have a dream of confession and redemption.

I said, “What do you make of that?”

She said, “What makes you think it didn’t really happen?”

She then told me that she had also had an out of body experience. At the instant of giving birth to her first child, as the baby was actually leaving her body, she described having a feeling like a tremendous orgasm, and that immediately her consciousness flew out of her body and was enveloped in what she described as a “pure golden light of endless love.” It was so transcendent and beautiful that she never wanted to leave. She thought she might have died, but didn’t care. That light of pure love was all-embracing. Then she heard the far off cries of her newborn daughter, and that forcibly pulled her consciousness back into her body. She had tears in her eyes at leaving that “place.”

I have often wondered if that “place” was the source of a mother’s love, the bond between mother and child. Or perhaps the source of all Love, the sea of light from which our lone drops are formed in this life.

She later did a small, all-woman study about such experiences, and received some surprising results from the study group. Apparently 5% of the women who responded have had similar experiences, sometimes during childbirth and sometimes even during orgasm. But women don’t speak of it, attributing it to the stress of labor, to pain medication, or the rush of hormones during sex. (No wonder the French call orgasm the “little death.”)

We are spiritual beings having a human experience, and only for a short time. We come from that Light, and return to it after our time is over. And since I have come to think that our time in this life is allotted, as the luminous being implied when he said, “It is not your time yet,” I have for many years thanked God each morning for the wondrous gift of my life, for the love He has given me and the mercy He has shown me all the days of my life.

Each day, each moment is a blessing.

As it says in the Koran: “Verily, in the heavens and the earth are signs to those who believe.” (45:2)

A few months after my 40th birthday, on January 14th 1986, I was rushed to the Emergency Room due to the devastating effects of a misdiagnosed illness. Had my sister not been visiting to see my condition and insist I go to the hospital immediately, the doctors said I would not have lived through the night.

In the emergency room my heart stopped, and the doctors had to revive it with those electric paddles you see in the movies. I remember it only vaguely, though I did have slight burn marks for a few days. Eventually they discovered that I had Cushing’s Disease, a benign tumor on the pituitary gland (which is in the middle of the forehead) that caused the hormones levels in my body to run wild. The natural steroid hormone ACTH, for instance, has a normal level of 200. Mine was 6000.

And since the pituitary gland controls other glands and body functions, I had also gotten high blood pressure and diabetes. It was the undiagnosed diabetes that was killing me. Eventually I learned that the diabetes had been untreated for so long and gotten so bad so quickly because of the tumor that I was fortunate to be alive. By that time my eyesight was blurry, my muscles so atrophied by dehydration that I could barely walk, and I found it difficult to think clearly. There were numerous other symptoms, but those were the major ones.

Alas, we are captives to this fragile shell of flesh. Fortunately, they had an experimental drug, aminoglutethymide, that very slowly brought the hormone levels under control. Blood was drawn every hour to check the hormone levels, so both arms soon became black and blue from shoulder to wrist. Of course, being in a hospital has its own dangers, and I soon got a staph infection, endocarditis, which attacks the heart valves, and spent six weeks on Oxycilin therapy; another tube in my arm. I have a heart murmur to this day because of it.

I had so many tubes in my black and blue arms that it was almost comical. What wasn’t funny was the hormone-level induced paranoia. Like anyone on steroids, they affect both the body and the mind at those levels. I won’t go into the details, but suffice it to say I was my poor nurses worst patient.

The hormones would spike at night, and in the first days I would often go into a kind of catatonic state, sometimes for days. I would come out of it and the nurses would be standing around me saying, “Are you awake? Are you ok?” I once asked how long I was out, and they said, “Three days.” I didn’t know where I had been or what I had been dreaming, if anything.

About two weeks after I was admitted, when the doctors were still not sure if I would live from one day to the next, I remember lying in bed, on my back because both arms had tubes in them, and feeling very weak and strange. I had learned to recognize the physical symptoms of the onset of one of the catatonic states, but this was different. I felt certain that I was going to die.

And I did.

Like a flash, my consciousness, or soul, or spirit, or ka, left my body. I was flying upward around the balloon-like curved right hand rim of the universe at an impossible speed, faster than thought. I still had a body, but it was ethereal, light as a feather. I could see the small oval shapes of thousands of galaxies on my left as I sped past. A heartbeat later I was there.

In front of me was a long luminous table, like a raised dais, and seated there were beings bathed in light, but human in form. They had heads and bodies, and were robed in white, but I could not make out their faces. Were they angels? Judges? I don’t know. I think there were ten of them. At least that is the number that is in my head. Then I began to spin like a top attached to a string, though my consciousness looked straight at them. I am spinning and looking straight ahead. How is that possible? And I began to weep. I must be dead, I thought, and began, without any prompting or question being asked, to recount the sins of my life, and they were many.

Lying, cheating, stealing, gluttony, sex, drugs; all the small and great sins of boy and man. How small or large they were makes no difference. They were as big as my life then, and, besides my children, all I thought I had to show for it. Through my tears, I begged for forgiveness.

The being in the middle spoke easily in a calm, male sounding voice that I heard in my mind. “You are forgiven. It is not your time yet.”

Instantly I was flying back around the rim of the universe. The galaxies were on my right as I flew past, with an uncanny sense of going downward. In a heartbeat I was back in my hospital room in my body sitting bolt upright in bed. I was never more awake in my life.

When I finally went to sleep that night, I had a dream that I wrote a book that changed the world and brought peace to mankind. Now that is a sinner really trying to make amends, lol!!!

I began to recover then. Perhaps the medication was finally taking effect. Some years later I had occasion to see my medical records. On top of one page was written: Recovery is astounding. And so it was.

I left the hospital on March 7th, 1986, walking with a cane because of my atrophied leg muscles. For nearly a year I had to climb the stairs of my house by literally crawling up them on my hands and knees because my legs would not hold me. Slowly the muscles got stronger with use. By the time I had the operation to remove my pituitary gland on December 23rd 1986, I was fully recovered. After it was removed, the diabetes went away. The blood pressure returned to normal.

In those nine months between my release from the hospital and the surgery I began to write poetry. The words just streamed out of me in gulps, like great gusts of breath. I was so happy to be alive that love poured out of me in poems and in tears.

My state in that in-between time was one of infinite gratitude for the gift of my life, and for God’s infinite love and mercy and forgiveness. Like the stories I have read about people who have had near death experiences, everything afterwards seemed illuminated with love and the peace of mind of a new understanding of life. I wept a great deal at the most mundane show of tenderness and emotion, and still do. My kids make fun of me for it, but I don’t care. I know how precious a gift is this short life we are given, and the chance in it to give love and experience love, and through love, God’s love for us.

This ‘change of heart’ gradually diminished, and the ego-centered nafs roared back as strong as ever, but something was activated that did not go away and sought an outlet to nourish it. It led me eventually to the Sufi path and to the door of the Beloved.

Five years after being hospitalized and my out of body experience, I stepped on the path of the heart and was initiated as a darvish in the Nimatullahi Sufi Order. Six months after initiation, an idea for a book came to me during zekr, and twelve years after that I finally published the Sufi novel, Master of the Jinn. I doubt if it will change the world, but if it gladdens one heart for one day, that is enough for me.

Every word of this post is true. What details I have left out are not important to the reason for telling it. You may think it was a dream, a vision, or a hormone induced hallucination, and for a long time afterward, so did I.

I had been a cynic and agnostic for as long as I can remember. I have never believed in hell, but always desired to know what, if anything, lies beyond this life, to know what is meant by God. Perhaps this is always at the edge of consciousness in everyone. Now, after fifteen years on the Sufi path, I am sharing this story so you will know that beyond everything you experience and believe, there is a truth that is unimaginable, and that one day you too will experience it. It is written about in Holy Books, and phrased in lovely language and parables and aphorisms, poetry and stories, and lived through the lives of Prophets and Saints.

It is love and mercy and compassion and forgiveness and love again, so complete and encompassing that we are born out of it, and return to it in the end. It is the bond of this Love that each of us shares, felt most strongly in the bond between mother and child, but felt nonetheless by each of us to the degree that we let it in. The Sufi path is nothing more than this, life is all of this, and that is all I know.